If ever there was a time to appreciate the startling forward bounce of Nextfest, it’s the 20th-anniversary double bill that’s running at the Mercury Theatre (formerly Azimuth).

Hard to believe, but Theatre Network’s prescient festival devoted to Edmonton’s emerging artists, and taking its cue from their bent for multi-disciplinary experimentation, is turning 20 this year. And to mark the occasion, Bradley Moss and Nextfest producer Steve Pirot handed two starry young directors, Beth Dart and Andrew Ritchie, the keys to the vault.

The archive is by now crammed with opening scenes for success stories; arts careers across the country got started at an open-hearted festival that didn’t just pay lip service to young talent but actually produced the work. For an audience. Two are on display at the Mercury. Dart, who presides over Nextfest’s unique “performance parties,” picked Leah-Simone Bowen’s Code Word: Time, first produced at the 2001 Nextfest.

I remembered the play for its savvy in building its own multimedia multi-screen theatricality into the escalating drama of the piece, and for its menacing insights about the all-pervasive surveillance that tracks our lives, and maybe even scripts them. As Dart’s production confirms, it still has a wallop, maybe more than ever in the social media extrapolations provided by the last decade and a half. Code Word: Time starts innocuously enough, in the desultory exchanges among three strangers stuck in a highrise office elevator equipped with a surveillance camera. In counterpoint, we see the camera-obsessed maintenance man somewhere else in the building who’s viewing them on his office monitor, distracted by old footage of Three’s Company, Beatles covers, and his own selfie video production. Ben Gorodetsky gives the janitor a twitchy loner’s logic. And the other actors exude plausibility as a full-of-himself consultant in a suit (Graham Mothersill), a blue-collar dude (Cliff Kelly), and a conciliatory office worker (Bonnie Ings) in waste management statistics.

The conventional surface they create keeps cracking, and shifting, in odd ways (a couple of times these seem like missteps). There’s a shocker to follow.

Bowen’s sly piece is all about complicity and escalation, in the confusion between what is “real” and what is “created” in the 2-D world. The video presence, both collected and live, is the work of the ingenious Matt Shuurman. And, unlike so much of “multimedia” theatre, it’s vital. The playwright incidentally is now a presence in the Toronto indie theatre scene.

Rosemary Rowe’s No One Showed Up For The Anarchist Rally, first produced at the 1998 Nextfest, is a tangible demonstration of the wide embrace that the festival has offered the next generation of young artists. Unlike much of the work on display at Nextfest, which runs to dark-hued, tragic, sometimes earnest, explorations of youthful angst, Rowe’s bent is for comedy (and quixotic titles).

Comedy as a serious, and revealing, art form, with sparkle and witty dialogue, isn’t thick upon the ground in this country. Seventeen years ago, Nextfest said “bring it on!” to one. The renegade 23-year-old Edmonton playwright Rowe had done something radical: She’d written a funny, worldly comedy about exactly the kind of youthful angst and sexual confusion that tended to get bleak, heavy, life-threatening treatment elsewhere.

The friction among three mismatched college roommates — set forth in hilarious fashion in Andrew Ritchie’s production — is the infrastructure of No One Showed Up For The Anarchist Rally. One roommate is an event planner whose activism — putting the Doc Martens to corporate oppression and the patriarchy — includes another motive: getting laid. Marina Mair-Sanchez, a firecracker in perpetual short-fuse mode, is very funny.

One, amusingly played by Lianna Makuch, is a morose poet and anorexic modern dancer, who mopes around the apartment slow-motion in her nightgown, hogging the bathroom: “I channel the power of snow. … My feelings are so strong they knock fissures through my glacier.” The heart of the third was broken when her girlfriend dumped her and moved to Istanbul. She has abandoned personal hygiene altogether, and spends her time in her pyjamas, working on an epic rock opera about romantic despair, noodling on her ukulele. Paula Humby, smudgy-eyed, captures quite precisely the comic aspects of lovestruck despair without ever condescending.

The fun of the comedy is its insight, which occurs to all the characters from time to time, that you don’t have to abandon sympathy to enjoy a sense of absurdity. Like Nextfest itself — the 20th-anniversary edition runs June 4 to 14 — it’s both young and grown-up.

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